Sonia de Jager

This article presents an account of social power dynamics that centers on the notions of attention, control and scripts, elucidated through active inference as the evolution of shared policies with attractive tendencies. The acquisition and maintenance of social power depends on (changing) established habits: patterns such as languages, traditions, currencies, and other cultural norms—all of which will be framed in this article as scripts, because they represent communicable and iterable policies, or sequences of discrete steps. The first line of argument explored is social power as an effect of agents or groups exploring and exploiting how scripts control perspectives; i.e., attention. It will be argued that social power manifests through scripts in the capacity to modulate information-processing, and material conditions, through scripts as policies that organize attention and behavior. These processes can be understood as flows of information which can be modulated, and are therefore amenable to an information-theoretic, computational analysis. Observing the effects of scripts directing behavior as the basis of power and its material effects, leads to an argument about power as—effective and/or ever more possibilistic—computation, where computation is understood as a function occurring on a finite substrate that transforms an input into an output. Social empowerment is thus what grants agents more computing opportunities (as in: the concentration of attention and behavior as/or the transformation of matter), shaping the unfolding of future trajectories. Starting from the context of active inference, social power is therefore conceptualized as a function of variables including attention-attraction capabilities and information-processing efficiency, which together enable both script-creation and/or maintenance. Through an analysis of script-function, it is examined how power relations materialize through attention as information-processing, revealing straightforward connections between social habits, cognitive-behavioral patterns, and ensuing materiotechnical realities.